Edward Sanderson is a researcher and writer about contemporary art in China. He lives and works mainly in China and most recently, curated 'Grounds for Sound' at Inside - Out Art Museum in Beijing. He blogs about Chinese visual and sound art here.

Tuesday, 24 October 2017

On this month's episode I discuss the recent book Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism with its author, Marie Thompson. We discuss different conceptions of 'noise', as anti-music or the cacophony of industrial society, competing theories of noise and Marie's powerful argument that noise is neither inherently bothersome nor transgressive. We end by discussing some of the musicians and sound artists that Marie argues transcend the dominant morality by which noise is related to.

Marie Thompson is a Lecturer in Lincoln School of Film and Media. Her research centres on the affective, material and gendered dimensions of sound, noise and music. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has also published a number of chapters and articles on the intersections of noise and femininity.TracklistBredbeddle – Keep the Salt

Pauline Oliveros and Reynols – Cathedral Juice

Teddy and the Frat Girls– I owe it
to the girls

Vile evil veil – left luck #1

Angel Ho – removals

Henry Cowell – Aeolian Harp and
Sinister Resonance

Klein - Cry Theme

Helen Papaioannou – In the Loop
(performed by Helen Papaioannou and
Hannabiell Sanders)

This month's episode marks the forthcoming Melodies International reissue of the beautiful anti-war folk-soul ballad 'Blood of an American' by Bobby Wright (now Abu Talib). Little known and rarely heard, the record stages a reflection upon the unique intersection of popular music and radical politics in late 1960s and early 1970s soul music. This becomes an opportunity to think critically about the ways in which counter-cultural soundtracks have been sanitised and re-packaged in recent decades.

Thursday, 5 October 2017

Amplification//Annihilation is a live audio-visual radio broadcast featuring the work of Leah Barclay (AUS), Robin Buckley (UK), Kate Carr (UK), Minerva Cuevas (MEX), Graciela Muñoz Farida (CHL), Anja Kanngieser and Polly Stanton (UK/AUS), Andrea Polli (MEX), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (CAN), Ziibiwan (CAN). It was recorded live at Cafe Oto by co-curators Anja Kanngieser, Rory Gibb and Paul Rekret. Artists and activists are using sound to comment on, and intervene in, the climate debate. However, while the aesthetics of ecological crisis are pervasive, replete with a dwindling dawn chorus and celebrations of a nonhuman nature, the broader contexts and stakes of these images or sounds are rarely considered. Against the drip drip drip of glacial melt, this evening showcased sound works that seek to confront environmental change.

Programme Notes:

"There are those who want to talk about climate change, yet don’t want to talk about how those who are affected the most can’t prioritise it in the first place, because prioritising it would mean being forced to pull the layers back and also talk about the poverty, the racism, the injustice, the privilege, the hush money, the hit lists that climate change is operating from, the rounds it makes on earth starting with the most vulnerable. Everyone is affected by climate change, yet some are affected first, but no one cares until it’s affecting them."

Terisa Siagatonu — 'Layers

These are lines from the spoken word poetry of Samoan-American artist Terisa Siagatonu. Her words and voice articulate the violences of climate change, and they do not hold back. With this event I wanted to amplify the voices and sounds that counterpose the aesthetic narratives of environmental change, that peel back the layers underneath the dripping glaciers/bird calls/exotic geographies; works that ask questions, that might even demand answers. It’s not easy to do radical politics in the sound world; it’s not always easy to put sound to work as a political force. The works included here are not strictly just sound, nor do they all approach politics in the same ways. But they are part of a commitment to facing climate change and asking for those listening to be present, to be more than present – to intervene. (A.K)

Popular music’s conceit to authenticity is both crude and altogether well known. Essentially, souls bared, performers heroically elude corruption by the processes that deliver them to their audience. This belies a bigger story, wherein whatever is deemed ‘natural’ becomes privileged as a site where an older, innocent pre-modern culture is preserved. This is as evident where music is imbued with a primal energy as where the ‘countryside’ is assigned purifying or regenerating qualities. Indeed, these two attributes, the pastoral and the primal, intersect throughout the history of pop: folk and blues revivals, psychedelia, country, new age, to name but the most overstated.

Sonic representation of ecological crisis is not reducible to changing ideas of the natural, though crisis is nonetheless discernible in growing suspicion of ideals of authenticity. At the same time, the contemporary prominence of field recording as musical accessory or as a genre in itself, implies further permutations. Equally, existential experience of ecological and economic collapse is discernible in British Industrial or Detroit techno’s confrontation with deindustrialisation and thus globalisation, New Orleans MCs; tales of negotiating FEMA flood relief, metal’s black forests, or all those musical expressions of loss and forfeiture usefully called ‘hauntological’. At the very least, these betray a changing experience of what is natural and the

assorted ways that experience is lived. (P.R.)

--

Climate and conservation scientists share an underlying drive, in that their work seeks not only to document and understand, but also to create the knowledge and conditions for effective intervention. Here, sound and listening can be tools to monitor ecological change, yet the complexity of both wildlife communities and soundscapes so often eludes quantitative interpretation, and we're returned to the purely affective dimension: comparing eerily silent forests to the glorious fuck-you exuberance of the resurgent dawn chorus at Chernobyl, now long devoid of humans. Similarly, field recordings open intimate windows into unfamiliar lives and temporalities — the ultrasonic chirps of whales and bats, the sigh of glacial ice — yet so often aesthetically reify the notion of a vast gap between ourselves and an unknowable nature. The unequally distributed violences of global climate change and ecological devastation instead require us to rethink what constitutes the natural and the external, to understand our collective interdependence, and to hear the past and present structural processes that link the silenced voices of empty forests and oceans with those of vanishing islands, oppressed communities, 'redeveloped' urban spaces and empty towerblocks. Meaningful sonic interventions are those that stay with and confront these dynamics head on: that resist the extinction of communities, knowledges and ways of life with anger, solidarity and noise. (R.G)

Monday, 14 August 2017

On this month's show Warren Ali offers an autobiographical story of growing up under apartheid and later, post-apartheid South Africa and then moving to London, all through the lens of rap music and what it meant to him.

Francis Gooding is a writer. You can read him in the Wire, the London Review of Books, and in liner notes for releases by labels including Jazzman, Strut, Matsuli and others. He is currently working on a book about Sun Ra's use of electronics, and on a history of South African jazz musicians in exile.

Monday, 24 April 2017

A discussion and music revolving around the book Noise and Capitalismwith its co-editor Anthony Iles. Anthony discusses the book's emergence out of a London noise scene, the potentials that the music opened and also its limitations, and the very notion of noise as a genre itself.

Anthony Iles is currently a doctoral candidate at the School of Art & Design, Middlesex University and a contributing editor with Mute / Metamute and Cesura//Acceso magazines. He is the author, with Josephine Berry Slater, of the book, No Room to Move: Art and the Regenerate City (Mute Books, 2011), editor of the recent publication, Anguish Language: Writing and Crisis (Archive Books, 2015), and contributor to Brave New Work: A Reader on Harun Farocki's Film A New Product. Recent essays have been published in Radical Philosophy, Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art and Logos.

Monday, 27 March 2017

This month, Alpha, Isis, Eden, a sound work produced by Laura Oldfield Ford and Jack Latham as part of an installation with the same title at Showroom gallery, London, February - March, 2017.

From the Showroom's notes:
"...a new sound work, made in collaboration with sound engineer and producer Jack Latham, using field recordings taken by Oldfield Ford during experimental, critically-engaged walks or 'derives' in the area. Mapping the psychic contours of the urban environment through her subjective experience, Oldfield Ford also draws on her personal history of working in the area in the public care and social welfare sectors, as well as on time she spent in subcultural scenes as a squatter and political activist."

Wednesday, 1 March 2017

This month a recording of a live performance of Black Atlantis, The End of Eating Everything, an audio-visual essay produced by Ayesha Hameed in collaboration with Tom Hirst.

Recorded live at the Empire Remains shop in London in November 2016, Black Atlantis looks at possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic: in illegal migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems, and in outer space – taking as its point of departure the group Drexciya’s sonic fictional world, it brings together ideas around afrofuturism and ecological crises and the related concept of the anthropocene.

Black Atlantis combines two conversations - afrofuturism and the anthropocene. It takes as point of departure Drexciya, the late 20th century electronic music duo from Detroit, and their creation of a sonic, fictional world. Through liner notes and track titles, Drexciya take the Black Atlantic below the water with their imaginary of an Atlantis comprised of former slaves who have adapted to living underwater. This wetness brings to the table a sense of the haptic, the sensory, the bodily, and the epidermal. What below-the-water, and Atlantis brings back is the bottom of the sea, the volume of the water, the materiality of the space of the ocean, and other protagonists that inhabit the sea.

This third instalment ‘The End of Eating Everything’// Black Atlantis III follows Bodies and Storms// Black Atlantis I; and Agitations and Adaptations// Black Atlantis II. It takes its title from a work by Wangechi Mutu which shows a monstrous form of consumption underwater. ‘The End of Eating Everything’ considers what Drexciyans might consume underwater, what things are consuming each other around them and what boundaries might be eroded between the what’s and the who’s of what is being eaten.